1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ritesh Agarwal of CerraCap Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you for a couple of more specific points on that. You have a CIO panel. Do you also have a CISO panel that you check with when you do cyber security investments?

Ritesh Agarwal: Primarily CIO. If the CIO feels that he needs to get his extended team involved, they’d refer to their ecosystem or their folks.

Sramana Mitra: Within that, is there any sector-specific bias in your CIO network? 

Ritesh Agarwal: Definitely the three domains. We are calling AI a domain but it is not a domain. AI is very generic. On the healthcare side, absolutely. On the cyber security side, absolutely. We have some of the manufacturing side and the retail side as well.

The way they understand how the market is moving and how the products will be built and consumed, that is very helpful to us. I can take a cyber security product and ask a CIO if he would buy it. We don’t look at the domain. We look at what credentials the CIO has and what kind of advice he can give to us.

Sramana Mitra: Cyber security is very horizontal so CIOs across domains would have relevance. Healthcare, I imagine, is specific. When it comes to AI, it can vary.

In our portfolio, I can think of about three products that have specificity. One is particularly interesting for banks. One is particularly interesting for people who are doing large-scale advertising campaigns. This is an optimization for analytics and media buying.

These tend to be different types of use cases. That’s where my question about where your CIO relationships are.

Ritesh Agarwal: You’re right. AI could be domain-specific. When you look at an AI company, there are three things that you need to look for. One is the team. AI is not something that can be built by a C+ developer. It has to be done by industry experts.

Second is, the product that you’re building is a function of where the data is, what kind of data is going to be processed, and whether you’re building a technology or a product. If you’re building a technology, it’s a different DNA altogether. If you’re improving a technology, that’s a different DNA.

If you’re going after the enterprise market, what problem are you solving? How much access do you have in building the neural network and how fast can you get into the market? Those are the initial things that we look at. Once you know it, then getting across to CIO for a particular domain is fairly easy.

Now we know that they have got the base right. If they’re getting into retail, connecting the dots and finding out whether that product would be applicable or not is fairly easy. But the first part is the most important. 

Sramana Mitra: We are seeing very good AI companies and cyber security companies in our portfolio, which is why I’m digging down into what dots to connect. These connections are incredibly helpful. You don’t need numerous connections but a few really appropriate connections where there can be a product-market fit check.

In most of these, we already know there’s product-market fit. We need to get them in the hands of large enterprise buyers and go through the sales cycle. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ritesh Agarwal of CerraCap Ventures
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